"Using Iron Speed Designer, I saved $3,000 and three to four person-weeks of development and testing time."

- Kashif Abbas, Development Lead for MediaCom International

E-Inquiry Management System

MediaCom International
Dubai, UAE

E-Inquiry Management System is a centralized portal for managing, monitoring and tracking customer
inquiries and feedback. This small portal was developed using Iron Speed Designer for MediaCom International.

MediaCom is a leading company in karaoke and digital entertainment products
that bring simple joy into people's lives. The company currently has a presence in the Gulf Cooperation
Council [GCC], Asia, and Africa. MediaCom also plans to launch American and European divisions
soon.

The E-Inquiry Management System is a new application that extends the main website's existing Admin
Control Panel. The application is used in-house by the E-Business, Research and Product Development,
Marketing and e-Sales Personnel teams. The E-Business team members use the application to interact with
leads and prospective customers. It is also used externally by customers who submit online inquiries to
MediaCom.

E-Inquiry Management automates product inquiry and post-sale feedback submissions from new or existing
customers. This information is sent to the team administrator, who reviews and delegates each message
to the appropriate department in the company. The portal utilizes role-based security. This ensures that
system sales and post-sales representatives can only initiate, monitor and track the customer queries assigned
to them. Assigning each customer to a designated representative helps MediaCom communicate more effectively
with the customer.

There are three kinds of users of the application: administrators, sales representatives, and post-sales
representatives. Administrators login to E-Inquiry Management hourly to review and assign new inquiries.
They can see all inquiries, whether or not they have yet been assigned to a sales person. When a sales
or post-sales representative logs into the application, he only sees the inquiries assigned directly to
him. Representatives can review and compose a response or follow-up message in HTML format. The portal
automatically emails the message to the customers and saves a copy for management review and monitoring
purposes.

Responses are sent programmatically from the representative's email address (from the database). This allows
customers to reply directly to the email rather than forcing them to use the application to submit additional
feedback. When an application user receives a direct email response to a previous inquiry, he simply adds it
to the application under the original inquiry submission.

Managers review every E-Inquiry Management submission on a single page. They can sort and filter the data by
product, country, sales representative, etc.

Application size and scope

The application accesses one Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database and is comprised
of ten database tables, two views and five web pages. The largest database table
is the CustomerInquires table which contains approximately 700 records and grows
daily.

Every month, 20 employees process 200 transactions using the portal. The number
of transactions is expected to increase considerably when the application is extended
to America and Europe.

The project

I spent three days creating this application. Iron Speed Designer built
80% of my application right out of the box. I spent some additional time on language
translation.

Code extensions and customizations

I wrote 35 lines of custom code in about four hours. Customizations include:

Custom email alerts.

Audit-trail.

I did not incorporate any third-party components into this application.

Page layout customizations

I used the standard Hamilton page style in Iron Speed Designer.

Iron Speed Designer impact

This project would not have been feasible without Iron Speed Designer. My only other option was
to outsource it and spend around $3,000 to $4,000, which is the average cost of a similar application
in Dubai. Using Iron Speed Designer, I saved $3,000 and three to four weeks of development and testing
time. We created the entire application in 45 hours, including design, code customization and language
translation.

Next steps

We are currently implementing a new report that highlights user-based response rate and follow-up ratios
for process improvement. There is also a chance that the application will become a data warehouse for
several customer bases, created from different channels in the company.

About the developer

Kashif Abbas has a degree in Computer Science and experience with J2ME. He has been working as application
developer for eight years and has successfully designed applications for hospitals, laboratories and clinics.
Previously, Kashif worked as a software engineer customizing tourism and trading software products. He is
currently leveraging his skills to help establish other e-businesses in Dubai. He thanks Iron Speed Designer
for reducing his development time and cost.